Chapter Text
It’s been a couple of weeks since Ian watched Mickey cross the border to Mexico. A couple of weeks of Ian wandering through a confused haze, acting on autopilot, trying to pick up where he left off before Mickey escaped prison and turned his life upside down once more.
He made a promise to himself to get back to his organized life with a steady job, regulated medication and a reliable boyfriend. And he was determined to stick to this plan because it was the right thing to do. Right?
Dealing with his feelings after Monica’s death didn’t do shit to help him though. Neither did Trevor’s passive aggression towards him. It’s not like Ian blamed him for it. He definitely deserved it. Still, he was getting restless, not managing to get back into his old rhythm, feeling like everything was falling apart right in front of his eyes and he was once again helpless and not able to do anything to stop it.
His family was being even more dysfunctional than ever. Everyone was caught up in their own shit. Ian was feeling almost invisible, rejected by Trevor and barely noticed by any of his siblings. The only person his constant fidgeting didn’t escape from was Fiona.
Her question about Ian taking his pills though feels like another punch in the gut. Of course, it is always about the pills with him.
“Yeah, Fiona,” he mutters, eyes staring at the girl absentmindedly. “I’m still on my meds.”
Even though she nods at that, he can tell she doesn’t really believe him. But it’s not a lie. Not really, at least. He’s been taking his meds, but the thing is that ever since his little road trip with Mickey, his emotions have been all over the place and his schedule got fucked up and Ian might have forgotten to take a pill once or twice. It caused the effects to shift a little, leaving Ian in a bizarre state, hanging somewhere in-between consciousness and haze.
It doesn’t take long for Fiona to check up on him once again. The moment she approaches him sitting in the hot tub in their backyard, Ian’s ready to give her another confirmation that yes, he’s still taking his pills. But then she voices her suggestion about therapy. Fiona’s met with Ian’s tired, worn-out stare in response. She asks him to give it a chance, looking at him with her pleading eyes.
It kind of makes Ian feel guilty for leaving her in complete darkness as for his true feelings lately. But he’s just not ready to share. He doesn’t want to and that’s exactly what she’s asking him to do. The only difference is that this time she is not trying to persuade him to open up to her. This time she’s found him a therapist. Some woman in her thirties that claims to be able to help people sort their shit out just by talking stuff out.
Ian doesn’t want to talk.
He doesn’t want to see Fiona so broken either.
So he agrees to go to the counseling session just this once.
Turns out the therapist, a black woman with her curly jet black hair up in a bun with a name-tag that says Layla, knows way more about him than he’d anticipated. Especially about Mickey. Ian contemplates if he even wants to know how she’d found all the stuff out, but then he decides that he doesn’t really care. All he needs is to spend some time here with her, listen to her blabbing about the ways he can make his life meaningful again. And then he will say that he will be fine. And then he’s done with this shit. Should be easy.
“You have to find a way to deal with the fact that Mickey’s not coming back into your life.” The woman watches him carefully, waiting for a reply that doesn’t come. She sighs, making some notes in her notebook and raises her eyes at the redhead again. “Ian, as far as I know, your obsession with your criminal boyfriend is not healthy.”
“It’s not an obsession,” he shakes his head stubbornly, scrunching his nose at her choice of words to describe his feelings. He feels like whoever has given her the information about him and Mickey was being pretty fucking biased in their explanations of the situation. “And he’s not a criminal,” he adds under his breath.
“The Federals that are currently looking for him beg to differ though,” she comments, almost offhandedly. “Aren’t you tired of holding up this shell? This denial phase you’re stuck in, isn’t it suffocating you?”
“What I’m tired of,” he raises his head to stare her right in the eyes, “is you acting like you know shit about me. And what suffocates me is my family acting like they know shit about Mickey,” he glares at the woman, his shoulders tense and breathing slightly faster than before.
“What made your family think Mickey was bad for you?”
“None of your fucking business,” he spits out, but when no heated reaction comes his way, he shakes his head with a sigh. “His background? His reputation? Some stupid bullshit. It’s whatever. It’s fucking South Side, this shit is like default settings here.”
“Did any of Mickey’s flaws ever bother you personally?”
“I mean, at the very beginning, maybe. I don’t know. I just…” He furrows his brows and deflates, breathing out. “Who the fuck cares about his flaws? I love him. That’s it.”
“Well, coming back to your denial of dependence on him, love is the greatest obsession there is. So it’s just one more reason for you to leave it behind if you want to lead a normal, stable life. Stable is essential, especially considering your medical condition.”
“Of fucking course it’s about my medical condition,” he rolls his eyes with an annoyed sigh, throwing his hands in surrender. “This shit will never get old.”
“Would you argue with the fact that your mental state requires someone reliable on your side?”
Ian stays silent for a little too long and the woman takes it as her cue to go on with her invasive questions.
“Bounty on Mickey’s head and the Federal chase aside, do you believe that there is still a chance for you two to get back together?”
Ian stares at his hands, abusing his lower lip, fidgets with the hem of his T-shirt as he thinks over the question that’s been haunting him for the last few weeks. Is there any chance?
“I don’t know,” he swallows hard. “I’m not sure,” he admits finally, his voice merely a whisper.
“There you go,” she concludes. “That’s not reliable. Take your family’s advice. Take my advice. Cope.”
Not reliable, my ass, thinks Ian. He cannot possibly count how many times Mickey’s been there for him when everyone else had something more important to worry about.
“Yeah, right,” Ian scoffs with a bitter smile. “And how exactly do I fucking cope?” He spits out instead, understanding that pretending to work with her here might help him get out of this nut-house more quickly.
“There are tons of options. Get rid of everything you have that belonged to him. Come by the places that meant something to you and make new memories. Think of something you could have said to him to end things, your arguments, your reasoning, something you’ve been meaning to tell him but for some reason couldn’t. Get it all out. You need closure.”
“You’re saying this shit like it’s the simplest thing possible. Just cross the love of your life out of it and move the fuck on!”
“There’s nothing easy about that,” she shakes her head. “You’re a smart guy, Ian. I know you’ll make the right decision at the end of the day. We’re done here,” she closes her notebook and puts it away on her desk.
“Thank God,” Ian sighs and gets up to leave the room.
“I’ll see you around.”
“Yeah, sure. Nothing personal, but I do hope you won’t.”
Ian tries to digest everything the woman’s said to him as he strolls down the street, hands shoved in his pockets. He’s not headed anywhere in particular, just walking wherever his legs lead him. He passes by the dugouts and glances in that direction. Image of him pressing Mickey to the fence there, their heated kisses and roaming hands fill Ian’s mind in an instant.
“New memories, huh,” he scoffs, shaking his head.
He doesn’t understand how he’s supposed to cross out something that made him feel most alive.
Next he finds himself in front of ‘Kash and Grab’. He doesn’t mean to end up there. But the irony of the situation makes him chuckle softly. He thinks of Mickey holding onto the metal shelving in the backroom, them messing around while placing the groceries and some of the rare late-night walks home they shared.
He doesn’t stay for long out there. He doesn’t like the way his heart squeezes and his breathing gets all kinds of fucked up.
Ian gets to the Gallagher house in about an hour. It’s unusually quiet here. It’s not a surprise though. Not with everyone being so busy all the time lately. Ian’s grateful for it right now. He needs some alone time.
His eyes linger on the kitchen counter. He thinks about Mickey cooking pancakes for them, pouring them coffee. Can’t help but remember the way they would always drink beer for breakfast in the Milkovich house, but the moment Ian was prescribed his meds and Mickey moved in here, he started drinking gallons of OJ every morning with Ian. The redhead doesn’t even try to fight the smile on his face at these memories.
The couch in front of the TV makes Ian think about all the times they fell asleep here, drooling on each other’s chests or shoulders whenever they decided to have a movie night, but ended up being too tired to actually stay awake and watch the damn thing.
Ian drags his feet up the stairs, plops down on his bed and closes his eyes. This doesn’t stop the images of them in his bedroom flash in front of him. It is too much.
Replace the memories.
Ian would have to burn the fucking house down. And still he isn’t sure it would help. Because how come none of them understand that it’s not about the places?
Everything Mickey is already imprinted in Ian’s mind, taking up all the space in there; already carved into his heart, running through his veins with the blood.
Ian huffs out a frustrated breath. Toss Mickey’s stuff away.
He opens his eyes and takes in the sight of the room. Nothing catches his attention. It’s been around two years since Mickey’s last visit here. It’s not like his things are just lying on top of the chest of drawers or something.
He decides to inspect his surroundings more carefully anyways. He goes through his wardrobe, raids the space under his bed, shuffles through a huge pile of clothes on the floor. Still, nothing stands out, most of the crap looks similar, so Ian sometimes can’t even be sure whether it’s his, Lip’s, Carl’s or Liam’s. There’s no way he would know if any of this ever belonged to Mickey.
Coming to a conclusion that most of the time Mickey borrowed Gallaghers’ clothes anyways, Ian is about to give up on his little mission until he spots one T-shirt he would recognize anywhere. It’s the brown one with a large head of an elephant. Ian picks it up to take a better look at it and chuckles softly.
“Of course you’d leave here the stupidest one,” he shakes his head with a small smile on his face.
Without giving it much thought, Ian tugs his own shirt off and puts on Mickey’s. It’s a tight fit, but it’s not like Ian minds. He rolls his eyes at his own actions, realizing that it’s literally the opposite of what his therapist has suggested him to do, but Ian’s way past caring about it.
Finding a piece of Mickey in his house inspires Ian to look some more. He can’t really think of anything the other man could have left at his place, because he was never one to worry about such shit. It’s not like he brought a toothbrush with him when he stayed here. Mickey’s never had irreplaceable stuff. He was okay with using Ian’s things or Ian’s siblings’.
Still, a part of Ian just wants to hope that there’s something else. So he grabs a ladder from the basement and climbs up to look through the shit they store in the attic. There are multiple boxes and some of them were put there by Ian himself, so he makes room for himself up there, takes a seat on the dusty floor and unpacks the old bags, one by one.
The more time he spends in the dimly lit attic, the more nostalgic he gets. His childhood and teenage years, all of it rains down on him at the sight of his old stuff.
There’s a pair of nunchucks Lip got him for his tenth birthday to teach him some self-protection. They’d spend hours training because the redhead just couldn’t figure out a right way to use them. In the end the thing bruised Ian a hell of a lot more than it did anyone else for that matter, but it’s whatever.
There is Ian’s old porn stash, the one with the chicks on the front page and tanned muscular bodybuilder dudes on the inside. He never actually needed it after the day he went to the Milkovich house to retrieve the stolen gun, because ever since then he’s had an absolute winner in his spank bank.
There’s Ian’s old notebook labeled in Lip’s curved messy writing. It says ‘Pass geometry – get into West Point’. Ian flips through a few pages, filled with his scribbling, scans names of the theorems, a shit-ton of numbers, letters, calculations. It feels like it was in some other life.
At some point Ian finally comes by one of Mickey’s possessions. His brass knuckles. He runs his fingertips along the curves of the cold metal and he can practically hear Mickey’s words echo in his head.
“The shit’s fuckin’ bad-ass, right? Check it out,” Mickey slid his fingers into the holes, clenched his fist and flicked his wrist to show off to Ian.
“The fuck you even need this for?” Ian chuckled and eyed his grinning boyfriend with a smirk. “Your fists are already enough of a menace.”
“I mean, you’re not wrong,” Mickey raised his eyes at the redhead, scratching the back of his head in thought. “But come on, Gallagher! A man’s allowed to want some cool toys, no?”
“Oh, you like toys, I know,” Ian wiggled his eyebrows with a shit-eating grin and Mickey burst out laughing at Ian’s not-so-hidden innuendo.
“Fuck off, Firecrotch,” he muttered affectionately and flipped Ian off.
Ian sniffs despite the smile on his face and tucks the brass knuckles in the pocket of his jeans. He’s had enough for the day with all this diving into the past. He puts everything he’s misplaced back where it belongs to clear his way out of the attic. His long limbs do nothing to help him though and he ends up knocking down a stack of old journals, papers, bills and stuff.
“Shit,” he mutters as all of it gets scattered on the floor and he crouches to pick it up.
Ian places the journals back one by one until a blank envelope gets in his hands. He turns it around and opens it, fishing out a bunch of bills that are long past due. He shrugs and throws it on top of the pile absentmindedly, turning around to climb down the ladder. He only takes a few steps before he freezes and looks up again.
The redhead’s not sure what drives him, but he pulls himself up, snatches the envelope, closes the trap door and jumps down from the ladder. He makes his way back to his bed, turning the folded piece of paper in his hands.
Suddenly Ian thinks about the postcards Debbie has gotten from Monica’s hiding place. The ones their mother got for their birthdays and other holidays, signed them, but never got around to sending.
Something you’ve been meaning to tell him but for some reason couldn’t, he remembers the words of the therapist woman.
Ian bumps the back of his head against the wall gently, turning a thought over in his mind. Then his head falls forward and he eyes the elephant on Mickey’s shirt. He grabs the knuckles from his pocket and fidgets with them for a few moments.
Having thought it over for a minute, Ian sighs resolutely and reaches to grab a random notebook and a pen from his nightstand. He finds a blank sheet and, despite his shaking hands, scribbles down a ‘Hey Mick’.